No Regrets

Islands at dusk.
    No one had heard from him since August. For more than fifty years, he had personally written and addressed Christmas cards. The address list that had once numbered 150 had dwindled to only about twenty-five lifelong friends as he aged and his friends died off. Contacted bythe investigators, not one of his close friends had heard from him during the Christmas holidays in 1980.
    As Ray Clever and his fellow investigators continued to follow an ever-changing path to Rolf Neslund, they became more baffled. There were just too many stories. Now they learned that Ruth had told one of her neighbors that Rolf was in New England with some distant relative, and that she planned to go there and bring him home.
    Naturally, the question arose: “If Rolf Neslund was alive, what was he living on?” He hadn’t accessed any of his usual sources for money. When she was asked about how much cash Rolf had taken with him, Ruth came up with varying amounts—from six hundred dollars to twenty-five thousand dollars.
    It had been easy enough to find out where Rolf was during the first week of August 1980. But one day seemed to be the last day he was seen. He’d conveyed his concern and his outright fear of his wife to several friends, and then gone about his errands. On August 5, he ordered the new glasses, but he hadn’t picked them up. His personal physician had prescribed the drug Orinase (generic name: tolbutamide) to treat Rolf’s adult-onset Type 2 diabetes.
    Ruth had apparently failed to understand his illness, or she was lying to the investigators. She was wrong when she told them that alcohol “poisoned” Rolf’s blood. That was the opinion of someone with little medical knowledge; alcohol was not good for someone with diabetes, and it would certainly have aggravated Rolf’s condition and raised his blood sugar, but it didn’t “poison” him. Because he did drink, it was essential that he not run out of his Orinase prescription, and yet he had failed to pick up his medicine from the pharmacy, and he had never called his doctor for a renewal either.
    Besides missing his appointment with Kay Scheffler, Rolf had also arranged to meet with one of Ruth’s nieces, Donna Smith, on August 12. He hadn’t shown up and that puzzled Donna.
    The San Juan County sheriff’s investigators had now narrowed the dates of Rolf’s “leave-taking” to August 7 and 8. By the middle part of August, Rolf hadn’t shown up for any appointments he’d made.
    When he left, he had no money, no car, no glasses, no medicine, no extra clothes, no lucky cuff links, no watch, none of the items he would need for a long journey.
    But where on earth did he go? And how could he possibly mingle with other walk-ons onto a ferry headed off-island without someone recognizing him?

Seven
    The search for Rolf Neslund was ultimately frustrating. Several weeks after their initial visits to Ruth Neslund in her Alec Bay Road home, the San Juan County sheriff’s investigators had little doubt that Rolf was dead, but they had not one iota of physical evidence that might prove that to a jury. Cases can go forward with a preponderance of circumstantial evidence, but they were pretty sure that no prosecuting attorney would want to take on the case as it was. It was all smoke and mirrors and theory, nothing to take to the San Juan County deputy prosecuting attorney on criminal cases, Charlie Silverman. If they did, he would surely send them out to get more physical evidence.
    Furthermore, it really didn’t seem likely that a woman of Ruth Neslund’s age, who was overweight and claiming to be in poor health, could have the strength to carry out a grisly murder. Still, when this information was lumped with all the other bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence the sheriff’s investigators had gathered, it was at least enough to allow the investigators to obtain a search warrant for the Neslund property.
    They got their search warrant.
    On April 13, 1981, Donald K. Phillips, a supervising criminalist from the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab,traveled to Lopez Island. It was barely light when he boarded at Anacortes, and Undersheriff Rod Tvrdy met him on the ferry landing at seven-forty-five that morning.
    It was going to be a beautiful spring morning. Trees and bushes were just leafing out with bright green new growth, fruit trees had blossoms, and daffodils, forsythia bushes, and Scotch broom dotted fields and yards with bursts of buttery